Las Vegas, NV
December 10

"Babe, I don't like how sick you are still," Liam slid his fingers through his wife's dark hair, trying to sooth her, trying to convey his love through his touch. And God did he love this woman. Even sick, she was still the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

She'd been his whole world, his queen, since they were sixteen. Oh, her father threw a fit when they got married, straight out of high school. And of course, all his friends had tried to talk him out of it. But they didn't understand. No one understood the love they had. It was unbreakable. Ten years of marriage later, and they were still going strong.

But it scared him to see her so pale, so weak now. She hadn't eaten in two days. He'd had to postpone the start of a new job to look after her and their boys, who had come down with the same cold. Flu? He shook his head wishing she would let him take her to the doctor. But every time he tried, she just waved her hand and mumbled about doctors being an expensive waste of time. True, they didn't have insurance at the moment, business having slowed down the last couple of years with the housing collapse. There wasn't much work for contractors. No new homes to build, no money for existing homes to be renovated. Things were tight, but they had a little emergency fund, and from what Liam could see, this was an emergency.

He tried again to get her to consent to see a doctor, but she frowned at him, never opening her eyes. "Come on, babe. You might need antibiotics." She just shook her head. Goddammit she could be so fucking stubborn. Liam was used to people doing whatever he said. He was the boss. But not Sophia. She always knew her own mind, did what she wanted. It infuriated him, but it was also what he loved about her. He tried a different tack, lightening the mood. "It's been two weeks, and you're still coughing up whole potatoes."

Sophia laughed weakly, lifting her arm. Her eyes widened in surprise as coughs overtook her slight frame. She gasped for air, clawing at her throat.

"Soph?" He reached for her. The sound in the back of her throat was alarming, her clogged airway opening and closing again far too quickly, like when a blanket gets caught in the vacuum. Liam dialed 911 as he lifted her. "My wife isn't breathing," he said frantically, carrying her into the living room. "She's been sick, congested."

He dropped the phone and placed Sophia on the kitchen table, a pile of bills scattering beneath her. He tipped her head back, as the operator instructed, and breathed into her mouth, wishing more than anything in that moment that he truly could breathe for her. That his diaphragm could pull her lungs as it pulled his own. He breathed. And breathed. And breathed.

He sighed in relief as the ambulance lights outside told him everything would be all right. She would be all right. Liam held her hand as they wheeled the gurney onto the ambulance.

"They've got you, now, babe. You're going to be all right, Soph. You're going to be all right."

Except she wasn't.

And he desperately did not want to let her go. His heart ached when she reached for him, just as the ambulance doors slammed shut. Mostly, he didn't want her to be scared. And he thought all that fuss about doctors being expensive was really just her fear underneath. And he was trying so hard not to be scared himself, to be strong for her, but the truth was, he was terrified. He was terrified of losing her.

Liam ran back inside as the ambulance pulled away, woke their two sons, and loaded them into the backseat of his truck.

The road surrounding the hospital was jammed, packed so tightly with cars that Liam wondered if there was an accident, silently praying that Sophia wasn't caught up in this traffic, or worse, part of whatever was delaying them.

"Daddy, what are we doing?" Nick wheezed from the back seat.

"We're going in to the doctors," Liam reached back and patted his son's knee. "Get you some medicine, make you feel all better."

The guy in the Corolla ahead of Liam got out, coughing until he vomited along the center median. Then he scrabbled across the road and up the grassy hill toward the hospital, abandoning his car.

"Shit." Liam looked for space to maneuver around the little vehicle with his big pickup.

"Swear jar," Geoff mumbled, raising his hand accusingly.

Liam looked over his shoulder, first at his little boy, then out his rear window, putting his truck in reverse. "Sorry, little man. I'll put a buck in when we get home." He backed up a couple of feet until the people behind him laid on their horn. Then he threw it in drive and guided his truck right over the cement divide in the road and cut around the traffic on the wrong side of the street. What else could he fucking do? His wife was up there somewhere. In an ambulance, in the hospital, he wasn't sure. But he needed to get to her.

As he passed the intersection, he saw there was indeed an accident. A beamer had crashed into the light pole across the street. But that wasn't even blocking the way. There was nothing blocking the path of the cars at the front. As he turned toward the hospital, he saw the people in those cars were slumped, not moving. It reminded him of scenes in cheesy old movies when a whole room full of people got knocked out by gas.

More people started getting out of their cars and walking or running toward the hospital. He wove between the cars and over the side of a little hill, knocking the lighted "Las Vegas General Hospital" sign over, sliding to a stop in front of the emergency room.

"Come on, boys," he reached back and undid their seatbelts. "You guys okay to walk?" The pair nodded sleepily, Geoff taking his little brother's hand as they climbed down to the sidewalk. Liam grabbed Geoff's other hand and shuffled them into the emergency room.

The sight, the smell in that room stopped him in his tracks. It was like a scene out of a horror film. The waiting area was so packed with people, hunched, slumped, laid out on the floor, laid out on top of one another, some of whom were clearly dead. Jesus fucking Christ. There were gurneys lining the halls, the figures on them coughing and shuddering, or not moving at all. Liam stared for several moments at a woman whose gaze was fixed on the ceiling. He was sure she was dead until her whole body contracted with coughs.

Geoff and Nick started to cry. "Daddy, I don't like it here."

As if lifted from a trance, Liam looked around and then knelt down by his younger son, just four years old. "I know, Nicky. We'll find Mommy and go home." He had no idea how he would even go about finding her. He had yet to see someone who actually worked there. He patted Nick's little tummy. "We're all right."

But he wasn't. They weren't. None of this was all right.

Nick started coughing, dark green sputum spraying out of his mouth and onto the floor in front of them, which made him cry even harder, which made him cough even more. When his throat started making that clogged sound, Liam lifted him desperately.

"Help! Is there anyone here who can help me?" He ran down the hall. "Help, please. My son," his voice got caught in his throat as his wife's breath had been. As his son's was. He fell to his knees by the nurse's station, sobbing, fumbling Nick's little head back. Liam pressed his mouth to his son's, weeping as he tried to breathe for him. "Baby, stay with me," he pleaded between breaths.

"Sir, step away," an electric voice said. Liam looked up to find a doctor dressed in one of those hazmat space suits.

"Help him," he begged.

"We will." She scooped Nick up and carried him further into the hospital. Liam grabbed Geoff and picked him up, following right behind. Geoff would usually complain he was too big now to be carried, at eight years old. He was a big boy. But he was scared, Liam could see, and he clung to his father as they tried to keep up with the doctor.

After a maze of hallways, twists and turns, the doctor laid Nick out on a bed in a brightly lit room, and a swarm of other space suits surrounded them. Geoff whimpered when the doctors shoved a tube down Nick's throat. Then his whimpers turned to coughs.

"Not you, too, baby," Liam murmured, pressing his forehead to his son's cheek. He rubbed his back gently.

"Let me take him," another electric voice said. And Geoff was lifted from his arms. Away.

Another suit approached, the gloved hand touching Liam's arm gently. "Are you sick as well?"

He shook his head. "No. I'm fine. But my wife. She was brought by ambulance."

"How long ago?"

"She left just before we did."

"Okay. Come, let's talk over here. I'll get your information and then we can get an update on your wife."

Liam shook his head. "I don't want to leave them." Nick was unconscious anyway. But he was alive. And that was all that mattered right now.

"We won't," the gloved arms nudged him further. "We'll be right in the hall, and you can see both boys."

He sighed, giving in. "Okay." Geoff was being examined by plastic suited doctors in the very next room.

"My name is Doctor Lin. Can you tell me how long they've been sick?"

"Um. About two weeks. Coming up on two weeks."

"And have they received any treatment before now?"

"Uh, no, no. Just over the counter stuff. We thought it was just a cold."

"Haven't you seen the news?"

"What?" They didn't actually own a TV. Had given up the cable a few years back when things first started getting tight, sold the flatscreen to his buddy.

"Nothing. Sorry." The gloved hand waved through the air, as if to disperse the words she had just spoken, wave them right out of the air. "What were the symptoms?"

"Just a cough. And my wife complained of a miserable headache. But it started just with a cough." He shook his head again, running his hand into his overlong hair. Sophia was due to cut it right about when she got sick. "You know how you get a cold, and after it's been in your head a couple weeks, it finally moves down into your chest?" The plastic face mask nodded. Liam wondered in a moment of desperate hysteria if there was anyone actually in there. "Well, this just started in their chests. They just started coughing up green stuff out of the blue." Green out of the blue. He really thought he was losing his mind.

"And who showed symptoms first?"

Liam just wanted to find his wife, to see that she was okay. He wanted his boys and his wife back at home, breathing on their own, happy and smiling as they should be in the holiday season. "They all seemed to get sick at the same time."

"Have they, any of them, traveled out of the country, or been in contact with anyone who traveled out of the country?"

"What? No." Liam clenched his hands into fists. "Please can you find my wife."

"Okay, sir, I'll look into it."

The space suit walked away, and it wasn't until Doctor Lin was out of sight that Liam realized she never even asked his wife's name.

He ran a few steps after her. "Hey!" But the hallway was empty. And he thought maybe he had imagined the entire encounter. Maybe this was all a miserable fucking dream. Geoff was alone now in his hospital room, adding to Liam's fear that he had imagined the hazmat suits. But it was because they were all in with Nick. His machine was beeping louder and faster and longer, and Liam thought maybe it was just his own heart. But then he saw the doctor with those metal paddles. He tried to push through them. "Nicky!"

"Sir, please stay out there. We need room."

"Daddy," Geoff called weakly from the next room.

"I'm here, baby, I'm here," Liam slid into the bed beside his son and held him close as they listened to Nick's little body being jolted with electricity, over and over again. "I'm here," he cried into his son's hair as the other room fell silent.

"Doesn't seem to matter," an electronic voice muttered some time later. "Doesn't seem to matter how old, how young, how long they've had it. Their goddamned lungs just--" there was a loud slam-- "just liquefy." Shuffling feet shuffling away from them. Shuffle shuffle.

Silence again.

Geoff fell into a wheezing sleep in Liam's arms, and as much as he wanted to go see Nicky, to hold his little one, he couldn't bear the thought of leaving Geoff. He wouldn't. He'd already made that mistake twice tonight, letting Sophia be carted away without him and letting that doctor drag him away from Nick. He wouldn't leave Goeff. He wouldn't.

He didn't.

He slept there, curled around his son. His cold, cold son. He should get a blanket, he thought idly, as he woke, tracing his fingers down the cold skin of Geoff's arm. Cold cold skin. He pressed a kiss to his little cheek. Cold cold cheek.

"No," he whispered. "No, you're all right, Geoffy. You'reallrightyou'reallrightyou'reallright." His words, like a prayer, like pleading, begging God to make it true, fell away as sobs replaced them. He stayed there, holding the lifeless form of his oldest son, alternately weeping and sleeping, for two days.

Liam had no tears left in him. He stood like an automaton and walked out into the silent hall.

The silence was oppressive. He had never heard such silence in his life, not even when his dad used to take him camping way out in the middle of nowhere. There were lots of sounds then, all kinds of sounds. Bird sounds, wind sounds. But not here. Here, there was nothing. No sounds. No weeping. No beeping. No typical hospital sounds. Not even the buzzing of fluorescent bulbs, which were all off, as if someone decided they needed to conserve power.

The dim glow from the tinted green windows of the rooms lining the outer edges of the hospital was the only light he had to guide him. He stopped first at Nick's room, pulling the sheet down from his round little face. He looked so much like his mother. Sophia always said the boys looked like Liam, but he just saw her when he looked at them. He caressed Nick's cheek.

"I'm sorry, Nicky." He whispered hoarsely. "I'm so so sorry, baby." As he leaned down to kiss him, the bed shifted on its wheels.

Wheels.

He went back to Geoff, lifted his little body, and carried it to the room where Nick lay, resting him next to his brother. Then he released the lock on the wheel of the bed and pushed them out to the hallway. He wasn't just going to leave his boys there.

And now that Liam had a purpose, he moved more decisively. He rolled the bed back through the hallway he had carried Nick down, back to the waiting room. There was not a single sign of life left here. There were no more coughing forms. Just dead ones.

He hurried out the front doors to where his truck was parked, the Payne Construction sign blazoned on the side, and thankfully, it was still parked there. As he looked out over the city, he thought it looked like someone had paused a movie or snapped a still photo. There was no movement, not even a breeze. Liam shook his head, and lifted the bodies of his sons into the backseat of his truck.

He drove down the same path he had taken up, cutting over the grassy hill and down to the road. The streets were lined with cars, some abandoned, some still occupied, but none moving. None living.

Liam found more tears as he pulled into his driveway, pressing the garage door opener with the rough pad of his thumb. He eased the truck into the crowded space and thought about closing the door and just leaving it running. Just letting the fumes overtake him. The door got halfway down and bounced back up, recoiling as if afraid of something on the ground. But Liam knew, had known even as he considered ending his life, that this truck didn't fit in their cramped garage, not with all his tools there too. He leaned his head against the steering wheel and wept again. "Oh, Sophia. Where are you?"

When his eyes were dried out again, he climbed down out of the cab of his truck. He dug through the tools at the front of the garage and went out back. He stared at their yard for several moments. She would want them under the pretty Japanese tree that flowered in the spring. They would probably rather go under the jungle gym. He lost himself in the physical exertion, hacking and beating at the frozen earth. It was unusually cold for Las Vegas this year, a frost of snow coating the ground.

When he had a hole deep enough, he went into the house. He collected what he needed from each boy's room. On his way back out, he paused at the swear jar in the kitchen, dug in his pocket and put a twenty in, for the curse he said, the many many curses he thought, and the many more he knew were still to come. "Fuuuuuuck," he howled. He wanted to punch the fucking wall. Instead, he carried on with the task at hand.

In the garage, he wrapped the boys in their favorite blankets, Spider-Man and Batman, then carried them outside and set them gently in place, snuggled next to each other. He closed his eyes as he scooted the soil back over the hole. He couldn't stand to see dirt scattering over them. He couldn't stand to see their little forms disappearing beneath the earth. He collapsed to his knees and circled his arms around the mound of dirt, pulling it over the remainder of the hole, dry sobs shaking his tired body.

Liam got his chisel from the garage, dusting his dirty clothes off. On the pretty Japanese tree, just above their heads, he carved their names. Geoffrey Michael Payne. Nicholas James Payne. And their birth dates. And today's date. His fingers lingered on the smooth bark for several moments. Then he patted it gently, like you would pat an old friend, and turned away.

He walked back out to his truck, got in, and pulled out onto the street. He paused, looking at the outside of his house.

"I'll find you, Sophia. I'll bring you home. I promise."

~~~~~

Please don't hate me for killing Liam's family... I'm killing off the whole world, pretty much, so...yeah.

Oh, and don't worry, the rest of the boys will be along shortly. Obviously they aren't a band in this story. They don't even know each other. But they will all be in it. :)

Please vote and comment. :)